Learn about the various data settings in ChartMogul Subscription Analytics and how to configure them.

Here’s what we cover in this article:

• Churn Rate Formula
• Churn Recognition
• Free Customer Handling
• Handling Past-due Subscriptions
• Refund Handling
• Smart Activity Classification
• Revenue Recognition

Access your subscription analytics settings by clicking Settings & Data > Data Settings > Subscription Analytics.

Churn Rate Formula

ChartMogul offers two churn rate formulas:

1. Standard formula (recommended for B2B)
2. Shopify formula (recommended for B2C)

Read our in-depth guide on churn rate formulas for details on how ChartMogul calculates each churn rate metric based on the setting you choose.

Churn Recognition

When a subscription is canceled, ChartMogul can recognize churn:

1. When the subscription ends in your billing system (default)
2. At the end of the final service period
3. The moment a customer sets their subscription to cancel (Only supported for Recurly)

For more information on this setting, please read our churn recognition article.

Free Customer Handling

The Free Customer Handling setting determines how ChartMogul classifies customers who have downgraded from a paid to a free plan.

ChartMogul offers two Free Customer Handling options:

1. Classify paying customers who switch to a free plan (or are given a 100% discount) as Active (default) — ChartMogul continues to classify previously paying customers who subsequently downgrade to a $0 plan (or receive a 100% discount) as Active. These customers do not contribute to your Customer Churn Rate.
2. Classify paying customers who switch to a free plan (or are given a 100% discount) as Cancelled — ChartMogul classifies customers who move to a $0 plan (or receive a 100% discount) as Cancelled. These continue to contribute to all of your churn rate metrics.

ChartMogul doesn’t create subscriptions for customers you’ve not billed more than $0.00 in subscription fees and — depending on the billing system — either doesn’t import these customers or imports them and classifies them as Leads. Learn more about customer statuses.

Handling Past-due Subscriptions

A subscription can remain active indefinitely — even after all payment attempts for an invoice have failed. In ChartMogul, we consider these past due invoices and their associated subscriptions as delinquent since they continue to contribute to MRR and active customer count until they are explicitly canceled in your billing system.

To avoid over-reporting the number of paid subscriptions, you can have ChartMogul automatically churn these subscriptions and re-classify them as Cancelled after they have been delinquent for a selected period of time.

ChartMogul offers two delinquent subscription handling options:

1. Subscriptions are Active or Past Due (and contribute to MRR) until they are explicitly cancelled (default) — you rely on cancellation events coming through from your billing system.
2. Automatically churn subscriptions which are [X] days past due — enables you to trigger a cancellation movement based on the number of days an invoice is past due. The available options are 14, 30, 45, 60, and 90 days past due.

For example, you configure ChartMogul to classify subscriptions as Cancelled when they are 14 days past due. On February 1, a customer misses their subscription renewal payment. That day, ChartMogul changes the customer’s status to Past due. If you don’t receive a payment from the customer by February 15, ChartMogul then changes the customer's status from Past due to Cancelled.

A few additional notes:

• The Handling Past-due Subscriptions setting only impacts the status of subscriptions in ChartMogul and does not result in changes to data in your billing system.
• ChartMogul adds the auto-churned-delinquent-subscription tag to customers whose subscriptions it cancels when you’ve selected the Automatically churn subscriptions which are [X] days past due option. You can find these customers by filtering for Tags > has at least one of the following > auto-churned-delinquent-subscription.
• In most instances, ChartMogul doesn’t make any changes to subscriptions that were churned automatically but subsequently paid or cancelled. This setting only affects subscriptions that are currently past due (at the time you apply or change this setting) and subscriptions that become past due going forward.
• ChartMogul will automatically remove the cancellation movement and change the customer's status to Active when a subscription auto-churns on the same date as the start of a service period.
• When you change this setting, ChartMogul reverses previous subscription cancellations before applying the new setting.
• Subscriptions that churn as a result of this setting do not generate email notifications.
• If a customer pays a past-due invoice after the subscription has automatically churned, ChartMogul removes the cancellation event. However, the payment must be associated with the past-due invoice. Otherwise, the customer won’t reactivate until the next service period.

Refund Handling

The Refund Handling setting enables you to remove refunded MRR movements retroactively from your subscription metrics. With both options, refunding a customer results in a decrease in revenue reported in your Cash Flow charts and an increase in Refunds.

ChartMogul offers two refund handling options:

1. Refunds are tracked but do not impact MRR (default) — refunds don’t affect MRR Movements or recurring revenue reporting.
2. Stripe: When an invoice is refunded (in full) reduce the historic MRR as if the invoice was never paid — removes any refunded recurring revenue from your recurring revenue metrics and also removes any MRR movements that were 100% refunded. The transactions table reports the refund, but ChartMogul doesn’t remove the original transaction.

Smart Activity Classification

Smart Activity Classification allows you to select how ChartMogul treats multiple subscription activities taking place within a set timeframe. For example, when a new customer purchases multiple new subscriptions at the same time.

By default, ChartMogul groups these activities and classifies the resulting MRR as New Business (vs. New Business followed by Expansion).

Learn more about Smart Activity Classification and how it affects New Business, Churn, and Reactivation MRR calculations in ChartMogul.

Revenue Recognition

Read more about revenue recognition settings.